


what he deserves

by mazabm



Category: Daredevil (TV), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Punisher (TV 2017)
Genre: Angst with a satisfying ending, F/M, Implied/Referenced Suicide, groundhog day with a twist, the universe is not fair to frank castle
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-03
Updated: 2019-01-03
Packaged: 2019-10-03 20:31:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,529
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17290898
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mazabm/pseuds/mazabm
Summary: It’s the same choice every time.“The wife or the kids?”He knew he was going to hell but this, this is fucking torture.Everyone knows to make a Punisher, you kill the wife and kids. The Universe will have her Punisher, she either gets one out of Frank Castle or makes another.





	1. Chapter 1

He thinks he must be dead.  The darkness hasn’t let up and he doesn’t hurt anymore. (He is not at peace, he is terrified and frightened.) 

“Open your eyes, Castle.”  He doesn’t see the owner of the voice, it’s just white all around him. A long, cold, white going on forever. 

“Wife or the kids?”

“What?” And he knows exactly what they’re asking, and it makes him feel cold down to his very core. 

“You know, to live, you want the wife or the kids?”

“Is this some kinda sick game?!” And his voice is so angry, so hurt. “I don’t want to lose any of them! Don’t make me choose.”  And his voice breaks. “Please.” And the voice just tsks, disappointed. 

 

He wakes up in that damn hospital bed and his house is empty when he gets there. 

He doesn’t change a thing. 

 

“So, the wife or kids?” 

And just like last time, it makes ice enter his lungs but he knows what decision he wants to make. 

“The kids.”  The voice is silent for a second.

“You didn’t even think.”

“I had time to think.”  And Maria would never forgive him if he chose her, he knows that knows that and there isn’t a day he doesn’t think of his kids, of how he missed Frankie’s first steps and how Lisa looked at him like he held the damn world and he repeats. “Kids.”

 

He wakes up in that damn hospital bed.

Down the hall, there are two kids, one with both arms in a sling, the other with a permanent limp, but they’re up, they’re alive.  They shouldn’t have survived (they didn’t, there are so many timelines when they don’t and he knows it) 

Everyone keeps saying it’s a miracle, but he knows.  He can’t hold his kids’ hands without thinking of Maria, thinking of how he’s never going to see her smile again because of his own choice. 

He can’t bear to see Lisa when she cries and at the funeral, Curtis doesn’t let him sit by himself and wallow and he desperately wants to. Without Curtis, he would be lost. The first time his vengeance consumed him but now he’s such a pathetic man when all he has is his grief. 

“It will be okay, man.  You’ll get through this.”  Curtis is also the one who holds him when he gets so drunk he can’t stand, Billy never shows, it still hurts. (The first time, he and Billy were together at the end. He remembers that Billy said he loved him, he thinks that somewhere in his twisted mind, he was telling the truth) 

He gets a week with them at home before he hears the sound of a car and then windows shatter as bullets rain into his house, sparing no empty space and he’s holding them in his arms, bleeding, dying.  He screams, he screams. 

 

“Kids or wife?”

“No.” He says softly.  “No.”

“So is that a neither?”

“No, no, no, let me die, with them!” And the voice laughs softly.

“That would be fair, wouldn’t it? You dying right alongside your family? But when has this ever been about fairness!”

 

He wakes up in that hospital bed, devastated.  

He calls Dinah and tells her the truth and he can hear her over the phone, so shocked, so devastated. 

He tells her he’s sorry, that he doesn’t go a day without thinking of the blood on his hands. He leaves his vengeance to her, warns her about trusting those around her and then he blows his own brains out. 

 

When he opens his eyes and sees nothing but white, he screams, screams until his voice should be hoarse and when the voice speaks it almost sounds sympathetic. 

“Wife or kids?” And he thinks about that little extra spare time he got with his kids, thinks about holding Maria one last time, thinks about being able to see her face, telling her how sorry he was that he made a promise to the U.S Marines And her and that the Marines took precedent.  That he's so sorry that the war followed him home. He wants to tell her he’s sorry he couldn’t keep her children alive.

“Kids or wife?” The voice asks again gently.

“Wife.”

 

He wakes up in the damn hospital bed. 

There is a woman in the bed next to his, her heart rate machine is steady. He cries. There’s a bullet wound right on the side of her head and he thinks of Madani sitting up and glaring at him from a hospital bed. (He misses her, misses David’s voice in his ear, misses Karen, he misses Red too when he thinks about it) but he sits beside Maria’s bed and doesn’t ever leave, but she eventually wakes up and smiles at him and he’s so devastated. 

When he sees Maria realize their children are dead it’s the worst feeling in the world. 

“My babies!”  She screams it, loud and piercing, she scratches at his chest.  “They took my babies!” And Frank feels so damn guilty like he’s drowning in it and she just cries and cries and he thinks when he chose Maria he knew this would happen but he gets to hold her in his arms again and he selfishly thinks that all he wanted.  

Curtis tells him that it’s survivor guilt, that both of them of suffering and it’s okay and Frank doesn’t have the nerve to tell him that the first time he did this, he almost got him killed, that if Curtis knew what was good for him, he would get away quick from both him and Billy. 

He gets longer with Maria then he gets with the kids and he can’t figure out how Rawlins knows when to strike and he can’t say anything to her, can’t tell her that he knows who took her children not when she already gets so tight staring at any news reports on the mobs that killed their children.  He recognizes in her that same vengeance he had (he thinks that together they could have torn Hell’s Kitchen’s very foundation down) but he doesn’t offer it (can’t, he has tried to keep Maria and war separate for as long as he’s had her, he will not give her a war that she knows nothing about)

“I want them dead.”  She tells him one night and ice enters his veins.  “Those monsters that killed our children, I want them dead.” And he can’t stop himself from giving her the world, from giving her what she asks for. This time the Punisher wears a mask and has someone to come back too. 

This time when Red finds him, he’s never been so glad to see the asshole. 

“They killed my kids, Red.  Men like that don’t deserve to live.”

“That’s not your call.”

“Then whose is it? Yours? The government? The ones that killed my children!” And Frank could stop but he sees Maria, sees the way she follows the news cycle, sees how she changes, sees how she demands justice for her children.  He tries to protect her from those trying to kill her (he hasn’t been half as ruthless as he was the first time)

And this time when he meets Karen, when he gives her his skull and he tells her to tell the truth, she tells him that they’re calling him an avenging angel, that he’s saving people and he hasn’t the heart to tell her the truth. 

Dinah still isn’t in New York, he bides his time.  

“Watch out for your girl,” He tells Red, trying to save him from heartbreak but just like last time, Frank is there as he holds the girl he loves.  He’s sorry but there are things that are unavoidable, no matter what they choose. 

Madani still isn’t in New York, he waits. 

“You always did care too much Frankie boy”

Maybe it’s fitting that he and Billy are both still here, are both still two assholes circling each other. 

Even when Billy comes over and Maria has him for dinner and he smiles and she smiles back, a part of Frank aches to tell her the truth but he can’t, refuses to.  Billy acts as if nothing has changed, he’s a little more somber of course, they lost their children but he says the right things and a part of Frank wants to believe, desperately wants to believe that he never betrayed them. 

Maybe that’s why it’s such a surprise when he’s shot.  

“No hard feelings Frankie, send Maria my love.” 

 

When he wakes up in the white again, he’s silent. 

“So,”

“Stop, please stop.”  The voice is quiet. “Am I supposed to be learning something or is this just to make me suffer?”

“I can’t answer that.” And the voice sounds genuinely sad and that pisses him off.  “Wife or kids?”

“No! No! I can’t do it again, don’t make me lose them again.” The voice is silent, waiting. “My kids.”  And it comes out a sob. “Give me my kids.”

 

He wakes up in that damn hospital bed.

Down the hall, there are two kids, one with both arms in a sling, the other with a permanent limp.  

“Curt, I’m gonna get out of town for a bit.”  And maybe it’s something in his face but when the other man hugs him it feels like a permanent goodbye. Curtis doesn’t understand why but maybe he can get Frank wanting to leave the city that killed his wife. 

He helps Frank get his kids out of the hospital fast, grabs everything he thinks they’ll need from the house, bundles them up and starts driving as fast as he can out of the city. 

“Daddy, where are we going?”  And Lisa is smart (just like her mother) but he doesn’t answer, he doesn’t know. So he just keeps going.  They stop in Baltimore and the whole way there Frank thinks about settling down in the country (thinks about Gunner’s dead body and leaving him behind) but he stops in Baltimore and finds a tiny little apartment, he enrolls his kids in school, he gets a job running a small bar.  He thinks that he ran away from New York like a coward and every day he looks over his shoulder expecting to see Billy or Agent Orange or even Schoonover finishing the job.

Life doesn’t get easier but it gets normal, he misses Maria, he has nightmares about what he did (the first couple of lives), his kids have nightmares about dying (because they did) and if they spend nights where he sits at the base of their beds and doesn’t move, they don’t talk about it (that’s what they learn from him, not to talk about it, Curt would probably say that’s not healthy) 

Frankie’s running through rehab with his arms and Lisa says that she kinda looks cool with a limp and Frank, well Frank figures that if he were gonna die, the bullet would have done it.

(He has a clock in his brain, this is the longest he’s been allowed to have them, he waits for the other shoe to drop) 

He teaches his kids how to defend themselves, tells Lisa right where to stab and knife and run like hell. 

“Never leave each other behind okay! You’re a team, you’re a family, you go together, promise me?”

And they promise and they don’t talk about it.

The summers in Baltimore are hot and dangerous and one night as he’s closing up the bar, he hears a scream (he’s not Red, he’s no hero) but his shirt gets torn trying to help the woman, who looks at him with stars in her eyes. She’s blonde like Karen and he feels like he’s been punched in his gut. 

“Thank you!” 

It’s one of those nights when he stops a man from mugging an old lady when a gun is pulled on him and it’s easy, ways to get the gun from the other man's hand, to point it down, it would be so easy to end his life(he was the Punisher once, his hands remember) but he stops himself from pulling the trigger, and the man, a boy really runs and the old lady hugs him before leaving.  He thinks about it all the time. 

“Daddy,” Lisa starts once. “When are we gonna go home?”  And he hasn’t the heart to tell her never, hasn’t the heart to say that they ran away from New York and if they go back he’s gonna have to hold their bleeding bodies in his arms and he can’t do it anymore. 

He’s an idiot for thinking he has a choice.  

He gets six months (the longest he’s ever had) when the car hits them.  It’s late at night, he’s coming back from the bar, the kids had sat in the back office complaining about boredom before falling to sleep. 

It’s not fair, the way it’s raining, the flash of the lights, the glass hangs in the air, he sees the moment, the snap of Lisa’s neck and he screams, Frankie’s head turned at an unnatural angle. He doesn’t die because the universe has never been fair to him.

It isn’t easy getting out the car but he hears the clicks of guns.  It was a trap, of course. Taking the men down is easy, he shoots each of them in the head when he hears his voice.

“Enough.” 

 

It’s the white room again. 

“Six months?” He asks. “Longest I can get?” And he’s so angry.  “Say something!”

“Wi-“

“Fuck you!”  He snarls. “Fuck! Let me die!  Just let me die!” 

“I can’t do that yet, Frank.”  And he screams, just screams and screams because this is torture, this is worse than hell, then fire. “You still have a ways to go.”  

“I can’t take it.” He says. “Please,” And he’s begged so much in this space. 

“You’ve survived worse.” And it’s very no-nonsense in the way they say it. “Wife or kids?” 

“Kids.” He whispers.

 

He wakes up in that damn hospital bed.

Down the hall, there are two kids, one with both arms in a sling, the other with a permanent limp.  

He does the same thing as last time, hugs Curtis, buries Maria, gets the fuck out the city. 

And no matter what he does (because he’s trying okay, he hasn’t killed anyone in three lives, let him have something, please)

He’s holding his baby girl's body, has his son's bleeding head in his lap. 

He screams.

 

White room.

“Kids.”

 

He wakes up in that damn hospital bed.

Down the hall, there are two kids, one with both  arms in a sling, the other with a permanent limp

He gives them to Matthew Murdock.

“Sir, I don’t, ” 

“I know who you are Red.” And Frank can see the way his body changes. “The men that killed my wife, they’re very thorough, they’re gonna try to kill my kids and if anyone can protect them it’s you. Karen, Nelson, you’re good people, you’ll make sure they’re okay. You'll make sure they're safe.” 

“What are you going to do?” 

“I’m going to avenge my wife, I’m going to finish this.”

In this life, he holds his children’s bodies and Karen’s, looks into her glassy blue eyes, that had looked at him with so much hope and he cries before he’s finally put out of his misery. 

He tries again, and again, and again. 

 

“I can’t do it!” 

“Yes, you can!” And he feels the intensity.  “You’ve never given up once in your life Castle, even when you blew your own brains out, you still told Madani, you still changed everything.” And that was lives ago (but he can still remember her voice on the phone begging him to come to see her, he had said no) “Wife or kids, Frank?” 

“Wife.”

 

He wakes up in that hospital bed and crawls into hers and just holds her, he holds her until she wakes up and she holds him and they cry together over losing their children. 

“I’m home.” He tells her over and over.  “I’m home.” And he is.

He calls Billy the moment they’re out of the hospital. 

“I know what you did.” And Maria watches him, surprise in her face. “and I’m coming for you and Rawlins”  That night he tells Maria the truth, tells her about how he went to war and never came back, how he loved her and the children so much that he let them down by bringing that war back to them. 

She slaps him, tears streaming down her eyes and then she kisses him and doesn’t let go. 

He teaches her everything he can, tells her where to stab someone for them to bleed out, shows her how to snap a neck. (He’s a bad influence, he’s grieving) 

He holds Rawlins down and Maria rips his eyes out (coping is for normal people, he is a Marine, she is the sun, they’ve never been normal) 

In the end, Billy shoots Maria without hesitation, and laughs at Frank, laughs hard. 

“It always comes down to us doesn’t it, eh Frankie boy.” And maybe Frank is numb to the violence and pain, maybe he just knows that Billy is always going to do this to him. 

 

White room.

He’s stopped counting. 

“Welcome back.” The voice said. “ it’s still the same old, same old here.”  

“Can you just give me a minute?” The voice doesn’t respond. 

“Wife or kids?”

“Both.” There is silence.

 

He stands next to Maria as the horses go around and around and he panics. 

“Get down!” And Maria knows him, knows he wouldn’t tell her something if he didn’t mean it and she’s down. He’s running to his kids when he hears the first crack of the bullet. 

“No, no, no!” And he’s grabbing his kids, pushing them down into the middle of the Carousel.  He sees their frightened faces in the mirror thinks about when he cracked Billy’s face into it. And then he stands over them. 

“No, Frank! No!!” And he thinks that if she lives she will never forgive him for this and he closes his eyes, he doesn’t have to watch, he doesn’t have to see this time. 

 

“Smart move.” And he refuses to open his eyes, refuses to see the bright white light.  “Do you know what to say now, have you figured it out?” And he thinks he has.

“Wife or kids?”

“Me.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I gave Frank Castle a happy ending, once, which was more than he deserved.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> i couldn't leave it like that.

He wakes up with a gasp.

“Frank! Frank!” And he looks at her, breathes out a breath of relief.  It's her, Karen, he can still remember holding her bleeding body in his hands, can still see her dead blue eyes gazing up at him. “Nightmares again?” And she smiles so softly at him. “It’s okay.” But it’s not and his hands tremble as he runs them across her face.

“I wanna go see them.”  He says and she nods.

“We can do that, let me call Matt, unless,” And she looks at him through her lashes. “You wanna go by yourself.”

“No.”  He doesn't want to do by himself And she smiles, relieved.

“Okay, let’s get ready then.”

He presses his fingers to their names on the tombstone, thinks about the way Maria smiled when she danced in his kitchen, the way she cried and held onto him as they both experienced so much pain.  He draws a flower underneath Lisa’s name and he thinks about the way Lisa would limp around the kitchen, trying to help him even as she was in so much pain. The way she didn’t quite get her math anymore and how that frustrated her so much.  He looks at Frank Junior’s marker and he thinks about the way Frankie figured out how to play his video games with only use of his fingers. How he grew up so fast when they needed him too.

And because he can’t stop himself, he thinks about the way Billy would make Maria smile for the first time since their children had been killed. The way he stood outside their hospital room and swore he would give them everything (and he thinks about how he betrayed them over and over again)

He thinks about Curtis and his unfailing loyalty and how by leaving him, Frank made him safer and he thinks of the way the girl with blonde hair thanked her for saving his life.

And then he looks at her, as she stands near the car, leash in hand, their pitbull pawing around at her feet and he stands up and she takes his hand and kisses his cheek. He doesn’t deserve her.  He doesn’t deserve this. She squeezes his hand, They leave.

 

“He made the right choice, this is not fair to him.” And the voice is angry, angry on his behalf, furious at the world.

“Life isn’t fair, if it were, why Mr. Castle would have never come home in the first place, not after what he's done.”

“So what now?”

”Well, now he lives with what life he actually has, and what he deserves.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "Sometimes you suffer and you don't get a happy ending but you get an okay one and that is what you deserve."

**Author's Note:**

> Tumblr: consistenthero


End file.
